A double take for baseball.
For the common fan of baseball the game is timeless. A game played without a clock, measuring today's players against the greatest of generations gone by. It is a game of uncertainty in which math tries to define, every year producing new equations to compare players.
Compare by the statistics they produce, to players long since gone. Players who know live on through the numbers they left behind on the field. It is a game which seems to have no beginning and no end. It is as if the players take a few days off during the winter for bad weather only to warm up each spring and continue the game. It is a game which produces heroes dressed as villains and changes the game forever.
For those who know me, and read my posts on this website, I do not hide my feelings on steroids. I, like most, have become quite numb to the news. It seems as if each time a player's name is found on a list, or fail a test, we simply shake our heads and expect it. With the promotion of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I was reminded of the strike of 1994, as she played a part in ending it. The strike was the moment my dad points out to giving up on baseball. This was the moment the players and owners became bigger than the game and changed a game he once loved. Many of us felt this. We were betrayed by the same game we lived and died with.
As I look back now, I wonder, why did many fall back in love with this game of inches and not just give up? Was it Cal Ripken Jr. and his chase of Lou Gehrig the following year? Where would the game we love be today without Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire's magical 1998 Season? Where would baseball be today without the masterful late career resurgence and multiple Cy Young performances of Roger Clemens? Every night he pitched, you wanted to watch, or check the box score in the morning. What about Barry Bonds and the many baseballs he launched into McCovey Cove, sending a mass of kayaks to attack, leaving a simple number (762) to define a career perhaps never equaled?
After looking back on the many events which followed the strike in 1994, I began to realize many of them were synthetic. Inflated moments which can never truly be compared to the past. One can look back at the majority of these moments with disgust and hate, but at the core of it you begin to notice steroids perhaps played the biggest role in saving baseball. When many gave up and walked away from the game, steroids made it interesting again. We turned back the channel and put our ball caps back on. We filled the ballparks to catch a homerun ball or simply witness greatness in person.
In past few years, a black hole has descended upon the game with player lists of failed drug tests. Can baseball pull itself out of the black hole, before being sucked into the abyss forever? Some of the greatest players of this generation fell one by one chasing their place in history. We are now left with many questions of our hero's. These are the after effects of the so called "steroid era". Perhaps with some perspective we will see, baseball may have been saved by the very villian we all ignored.
Bill Toth
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5/27/2009 12:00:00 AM
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